


Tempusmotor

by lirin



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2020-12-27 09:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21116570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin
Summary: When the Dark Lord kills Lily alongside her husband and son, Severus Snape invents a spell to try to save her.





	Tempusmotor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [newyorktopaloalto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/newyorktopaloalto/gifts).

"Where is the Dark Lord?" Snape asked, without preamble.

"He's already gone," Mulciber replied, scarcely glancing up from whatever he was doing. "Why? Did you want to go with him and have the woman for yourself?"

Snape ignored him, willing himself to keep his stride steady as he walked across the room and down the corridor. He had thought the Dark Lord would not leave for an hour yet.

"He said he wants to be alone on this one!" Mulciber yelled after him.

Snape still did not respond. Outside the building and hopefully out of sight of the others, he broke into a run. The second he reached the anti-Apparition boundary, he spun tightly and Disapparated.

There was smoke in the air of Godric's Hollow. Too late—he knew he was too late, and yet he ran forward anyways, for lack of any other option. Where was the Dark Lord? Snape heard the pop of someone Disapparating and hoped it was he, or else he would have some difficult questions to answer.

There was a house in front of him with its roof blasted in. Come to think of it, the fact that he could see the house at all was bad enough. The Dark Lord had had the secret told to him, but nobody had told Snape the secret. If he could see the house then the Fidelius Charm no longer held. And if the Fidelius no longer held, then—

He told himself all these things, and yet he still did not believe it. He pushed his way into the smoking, silent house. He walked past the body of James Potter on the floor, scarcely sparing him a second glance, and yet he still could not believe it.

Upstairs, in the nursery, the tiny crumpled body of the Potters' infant child lay in his crib. So much for Trelawney's prophecy. Snape wished he had never heard it, for this was all his fault. He knelt beside the third and final body on the floor and reproached himself bitterly. Lily Evans was dead, and the Dark Lord never would have bothered to track her down if Snape hadn't told him of daft Trelawney's mad prophecy. Lily was dead (and her husband, and the child who looked just like him, not that Snape particularly cared).

Whatever was there to do now? How could one possibly move on from losing the love of one's life, especially when it was one's own fault?

There was a rustling outside. It wasn't safe to be here. Snape reached out and closed Lily's eyes for her—those beautiful green eyes that would never shine again—and then he spun on the spot and Disapparated. As he had expected, any Apparition wards there might have been had failed with the Fidelius Charm—or had failed with the cottage's owners' death.

He had to get back to Hogwarts. Snape didn't know if Dumbledore would let him remain there any longer, now that the Dark Lord had succeeded in killing the infant Chosen One. (The baby hadn't put up much of a fight, for all that supposed "chosen" status. The whole prophecy of Trelawney's was a crock. Why, oh why, had he bothered to take it to the Dark Lord?) If Dumbledore killed him, that was one thing. Snape didn't particularly look forward to living in a world where Lily Evans wasn't, so he didn't think he'd particularly mind getting killed. But that wasn't Dumbledore's way. And if Dumbledore settled for simply kicking him out of Hogwarts, well, then he wouldn't have access to Hogwarts' library.

And Hogwarts' library was the one thing that Snape needed now, more than anything. Because if there was a chance to get Lily back, the information he needed was going to be found there. He Apparated outside the castle gates, opened them with a wave of his wand, and broke into a run. He only hoped that Dumbledore was too busy learning of the Dark Lord's actions this night to pay any attention to a mere Potions master of questionable loyalties. And he hoped the Dark Lord was too busy preening over his most recent murders (and, perhaps, being harried by Dumbledore? one could hope...) to pay any attention to the sudden absence of a Potions master of, again, questionable loyalties.

A Time-Turner would not achieve what Snape wanted, even if he'd been able to get his hands on one, which he doubted he could. It only sent another copy of oneself back, it didn't completely restart time or bring the dead back to life. Most of the books in the Hogwarts library dwelt on that sort of manipulation of time (if they even mentioned time at all). But there were a few hints—a sentence here, a phrase there—that Snape remembered, and that Halloween night as he ransacked the restricted section, those memories were the only thing that gave him hope. There could be another way. There had to be.

By the time he carried a pile of half a dozen tomes back to his office, the sun must have been rising outside. (As if there could be light in a world where Lily Evans no longer existed.) He set the books on his desk, all opened to those tiny glimpses of possibility, and surveyed what he had found.

There was no pre-existing spell, of course. He would have to puzzle one out, probably trying several different possibilities before he found one that worked. If it could even be done at all.

He bolted his office door, then put every locking and protective charm on it that he could think of. Then he sat down and set to work.

_"Once the ring of time is formed, only death can stop its spiral. The ring can be stolen or given or forgotten, but it rolls on,"_ one book read. Snape glared at the pages. They told him that a time loop could be formed (or at least, he hoped that was what they were saying), but didn't seem to think details would be needed. _"Time is helical; in some circumstances, parallel portions of the helix can be bridged if they are directly adjacent."_ Still nothing on how it was to be done. But fortunately for Snape, this was hardly the first time he'd invented a spell. Once he had the idea fixed in his mind, he felt sure he'd be able to find the words for it (if it could even be done at all). He sat for a while, puzzling over the definition of time and the shape it took, and how one might step across the curve of the helix. There in the windowless office, it was easy to lose track of time. Later that day—or perhaps it was the morning of the next—Snape scribbled some possible incantations in the margin of the book closest to him. _Helixtempus. Transhelix. Tempusmotor._ But if the helical shape of time were borne out more in the wand movement than in the incantation— He scribbled out the first two potential incantations and scrawled a few more notes, hoping that getting the words out on the page would help him make sense of his thoughts. 

It was a while after that—he had no idea how long; it could have been one hour or a dozen—that he finally decided he could wait and wonder and reflect no longer. He stepped away from his desk, out into the middle of the floor, and raised his wand. Then realizing the implications of restarting time, he seized one of the books—the one he'd made most of his notes in—and held it in his left arm. It wouldn't do to lose all the research he'd done and have to do it again if this didn't work perfectly on the first try. He raised his wand once more, thought of Lily's laughing green eyes, and spoke firmly. "_Tempusmotor._"

He felt as if he had been standing there forever, clutching the heavy book with his one hand and holding out his wand with the other. What was time, anyway? What day was it, what year was it, had time passed since he had said the spell and if so was it a moment or a lifetime?

Then he was falling forward, forward, forward. He landed on his hands and knees, and the book fell to the floor with a thud. Snape lay there for a minute, panting.

The door opened. "What was that noise?" Mulciber asked.

"Dropped something," Snape mumbled. The spell had at least had an affect on his spatial location, but what of the temporal? "Has the Dark Lord left yet?"

"He's just left," Mulciber said. "There'll be one less Chosen One within the hour."

"Right," Snape said, standing up. His heart was pounding so fast that he felt certain it must be obvious to anyone watching, but he forced himself to sneer. "Did you need something, or do you just enjoy watching people drop books?"

"Just wanted to make sure it wasn't an attack," Mulciber said. "If something happened while the Dark Lord is away, I'm sure he would hold us responsible."

"I'm sure he would," Snape said. He walked over to the desk in the corner of the room and pretended to be engrossed in the book he had dropped. After what seemed forever (what was time even, anymore?), Mulciber got the picture and went out, closing the door behind him. Snape immediately stood up, leaving the book on the desk, and climbed out the window.

Godric's Hollow was smoking again, and the house was visible. God, he'd wasted too much time talking to Mulciber. Snape waited for the pop of the Dark Lord Disapparating, then crept forward to ascertain for himself that he had failed.

Lily's body was just as painful to see this time as it had been the time before. Snape ignored the tiny crumpled form in the crib, just as he had ignored Potter's body downstairs, and crept closer to Lily. Was he simply going to kill Lily over and over again by his actions? Was he only making things worse?

But he had chosen this approach, and now he must continue it. He closed Lily's eyes gently, like stroking the petals of the flower she was named after, and didn't even bother to leave the cottage before he reached out to the helix of time once again.

He hoped that the incantation worked just the same to loop around again as it had the first time, because he didn't have any other ideas. "_Tempusmotor_," he whispered, and Lily's body faded from view.

Everything was easier the second time, falling and waiting a lifetime and no time at all for time to exist once again. But he was still too late. And too late again, the third time, and the fourth.

The fifth time, though there was smoke in the air, Snape could not find the house. The Fidelius Charm still stood—could Lily yet be alive? But what could he do, if he couldn't even find the house? In the distance, there was a pop from someone Disapparating, and he hoped it was the Dark Lord. Perhaps he had thought it enough to kill the child and left the parents alone. Unsure what to do next, Snape wandered around the village for hours. At times, he heard the sound of several others Apparating or Disapparating, but never near where he was. When the sun rose and he still had seen no one, he Apparated to Hogwarts. Dumbledore would know what had happened. And if Dumbledore were inimical to him, then, well—there was always _Tempusmotor_.

He strode up to the gargoyle outside Dumbledore's office, snapped the password at it, and climbed the stairs. He heard voices: Dumbledore wasn't alone. He held his wand at the ready and raised his other hand to knock, but before he touched the door, it opened. There stood Dumbledore—and beside him, James Potter.

"Is Lily—" Snape burst out before he could stop himself.

"She's dead," Potter said, his voice tight and his eyes full of tears. "Did you know about this?"

Snape sneered at him. "I tried to stop him as soon as I heard about it, but there was little I could do when the Fidelius Charm hid your house from me and not from him. And I found out too late to warn anyone more effectively." Someone else might have told Potter they were sorry for his loss at this point, but Snape wasn't particularly sorry for Potter's loss. Look at him, eyes and nose red from weeping that looked like it would resume any second. Snape had lost the love of his life, but nobody was going to see _him_ running to Dumbledore to cry on his shoulder. (Certainly, the grief might be a bit fresher for Potter, who hadn't had five trips through the helix of time to get used to the idea of Lily laying dead and still on that cold, hard floor—but still, it was a shameful display, really.)

Potter rubbed his eyes. "Don't you understand, Lily and Harry are dead!" he yelled. "How can you stand there like that, I thought Lily was your friend!"

"And why didn't you do anything about it?" Snape asked. "You were there in the house with them. You could have defended them."

"I did," Potter snarled. "I ran to attack him, but he Stunned me."

"What's the matter, don't you know how to cast a Shield Charm?"

"That's enough," Dumbledore broke in. "Severus, I need to know what Voldemort plans to do next. I want you to go back to him."

Snape nodded. He turned on his heel and headed back out of the office. Behind him, he heard Potter asking between sniffles, "You trust him? I wouldn't trust him farther than I could throw him. How do we know he even tried to stop Voldemort? My wife and son are dead! What am I going to do now?"

It would be a mercy, really, to remove Potter from this situation. Maybe even the kindest thing Snape had ever done for Potter. "_Tempusmotor_."

Whatever had made the Dark Lord decide to Stun Potter on the previous loop, it wasn't a permanent change. The next two times, when Snape arrived in Godric's Hollow, the house was visible again, all three of its occupants dead. But at least there had been the one loop where things had been different. And Snape had all the time in the world; he could just keep looping and looping until he got everything right, even if it took forever.

He had no control over what time the spell delivered him at, and it never seemed to allow him quite enough time. Perhaps his route through the building and past Mulciber was too long, even on these more recent loops where he had ignored Mulciber and hadn't bothered to inquire after the Dark Lord's departure. 

On the eighth loop, Snape climbed out of the window and ran for the anti-Apparition boundary. He heard the pop of the Dark Lord Disapparating ahead of him; it must be a few minutes earlier than it had been previous times.

"My lord, my lord!" Snape called, panting, as he arrived in Godric's Hollow. "Please—please, spare the woman." The Dark Lord's gaze was unreadable. "Please," Snape said again.

"Go back to the house," the Dark Lord said finally. "I will bring her to you there."

Snape nodded. "Thank you, my lord." He Disapparated immediately; the best way to keep the Dark Lord from changing his mind was to show abject obedience.

He sat at his desk in his room, poring over the book with his notes on the helix of time. If this didn't work, he'd just go back again, and at least this time he wouldn't have to see Lily dead, the immediate evidence of his failure.

There were voices outside. The door opened briefly, and Lily was shoved inside. Snape jumped to his feet.

Lily. She was alive. It was the first time Snape had seen her alive since this whole thing had begun, and he couldn't stop staring at her. She looked angry, or sad, or something, but she was alive, and here, and he'd saved her.

"What the hell?" Lily snarled, struggling to get to her feet. Snape held out a hand to help her, but she ignored it.

"I saved you," Snape said, and she slapped him.

"But you couldn't be bothered to save my son and my husband," Lily spat.

"I tried, really I did."

"How did you try? Did you say 'Oh, Mister Dark Lord, can you please not kill these people' or did you actually do anything—anything at all—to prevent their deaths? You don't care, do you? I just watched my baby die, and all you can say is 'I tried'?"

Snape glanced at the book on the desk. "I did everything I could. I even created a new spell."

Seeing the direction of his glance, Lily walked over to the desk. "_Tempusmotor_," she read. "I thought you'd said you were going to give up making new dark spells."

"It's not dark!" Snape said defensively.

Lily was still reading. "You made time loop back on itself? So that you could change the past?"

"Yes, yes, I did," Snape said. "The Dark Lord killed all three of you, and I couldn't let him do that. So I made a new spell that would let me fix it. It was all for you, Lily."

"So the spell works, as you've written it here?"

"Yes, it does," Snape said proudly. He stepped forward to stand beside her at the desk, to watch her admire his work. "I wasn't certain if it would do what I wanted since it was so complicated, but the spell worked on the first try, and every time since then."

"Good," Lily said, and grabbed his wand. "_Tempusmotor_."

Time moved backward. For a lifetime, the two of them stood there by the desk, looking at each other, and then Lily was gone. Snape wanted nothing more than to lie down on the floor and cry, but time was running out, and he no longer controlled the spell. _Once the ring of time is formed, only death can stop its spiral. But the ring can be stolen..._

He picked up the book and hurried out into the other room, where Mulciber was sitting alone. "Has the Dark Lord already gone?" Snape asked, forcing the words out through tight pale lips.

"He has," Mulciber said. "He said he wants to be alone on this one."

"Right," Snape said, and hit him over the head with the book.

He wasn't sure whether Mulciber was knocked out or only stunned, but it didn't matter. Once he got his hands on Mulciber's wand, a few spells made sure he wouldn't be waking up any time soon or remembering any of this. Then Snape was out in the corridor and running for the edge of the anti-Apparition wards.

There was smoke in Godric's Hollow, as there always seemed to be these days. Snape was too late, he would always be too late, and he didn't control the helix of time anymore. But Lily would have known what was happening: had that been enough? Had she been able to stop the Dark Lord?

Nobody could stop the Dark Lord. But it occurred to Snape, suddenly, that he had not yet heard the pop of the Dark Lord Disapparating.

He crept forward anyway. He didn't much care if the Dark Lord killed him, now, after all that had happened. Lily, oh Lily, how could you?

The door of the cottage swung open on its hinges as Snape walked into the house. James Potter lay on the floor near the door, as was his wont. And upstairs—

There was a new body on the floor: the Dark Lord's spell had rebounded and destroyed him. There was one less body in the crib: Potter's child was sitting up, alive and crying. But there was one body that was the same as every time that he had seen it before, with green eyes that would never shine again. Snape knelt down and closed Lily's eyes as gently as he could. Had this been what she had wanted, when she stole his wand? Had she chosen this, to die for her son? How could she? How could she throw away what Snape had done for her?

He glared at the child in the crib, and felt nothing but hatred for him. Nobody could be worth the sacrifice that Lily had just made, and especially not a child that looked that much like James Potter.

Everything he had done for her, and it was all for naught. He'd invented that spell for Lily, not for her son. Hadn't she been able to see that? But it was too late, and now he would have to live with a world where Harry Potter was the Boy who Lived—and where Lily Evans wasn't alive at all.

_One year afterwards..._

"Any other matters to discuss, or shall we adjourn for dinner?" Dumbledore asked at the staff meeting. "I hear we're having roast pumpkin."

Madam Pince stood up. "I believe I have discovered a theft from the Restricted Section. Several of the books on time are missing. As you know, time is fickle and these books are harder than others to keep an eye on, so I cannot be sure when they went missing. But I'd like to question some of the students and see which ones behave suspiciously when I ask them about the Restricted Section.

Dumbledore had a twinkle in his eye. (Snape hoped it was just that the man liked to appear all-knowing and not that he actually knew anything.) "I don't think that will be necessary," he said. "I'll look into it a bit myself. I'm sure the books are in good hands."

Snape hurried out as soon as the meeting was adjourned, making sure not to look Dumbledore in the eyes. The books were still there in his office, shoved to the back of a shelf parallel to the back of the bookcase, so that the books in front of them would hide them from view. The things he had discovered—the ways of manipulating the helix of time—were too dangerous to be shared. What if the Dark Lord had learned of them? How much more damage could he have done?

And yet—that book was one of the last things he had seen Lily touch. Her hands had caressed the page, had stroked gently over the same place his pen had touched. He couldn't destroy that last remnant of her.

Snape waited apprehensively, but Dumbledore never mentioned the books to him. Perhaps he had just been pretending to be all-knowing after all.

_Seven years afterwards..._

The solicitor had warned Snape that there would be a lot of cleanup to do at Spinner's End, but then he wasn't a wizard. Snape thought that one day of work ought to be plenty: just pile everything he wanted to get rid of (or in other words, everything) in the middle of the floor, then cast a Vanishing Spell. It would be good for the house to get a fresh start, now that its previous owners were dead. Time moved on, and things didn't have to stay the same.

Things didn't have to stay the same, he realized. He wondered where Lily's child was now. He'd be eight or nine years old now. Lily had given herself for him...she'd considered the child to have worth equal to her own, quite considerable worth. Wasn't that worth something? Perhaps the pain of looking at the boy would have faded after all these years.

Snape grabbed a few pieces of Muggle clothing from the pile—a shirt and trousers that were too nondescript for him to recollect whether he'd ever seen his father wearing those specific pieces, though he supposed he must have. Dressing quickly, he told himself how good it would be to see the child that Lily had loved so much. The child that Lily had given her life for.

He stepped outside and Apparated to Little Whinging. 

The neighborhood was sterile, with aggressively trimmed hedges and immaculate pavements and no other pedestrians. Snape continued on, hoping that Petunia wouldn't happen to look out her window and recognize him. There were two boys playing in one of the driveways; the fat one was yelling about how he didn't want the skinny one to play with his toy. If he had read the street numbers correctly, that ought to be 4 Privet Drive. Snape stepped forward and looked closer.

"I didn't want your stupid ball anyway! You're the one who threw it at me!" the skinny boy said. He had dark messy hair and glasses, and he looked just like James Potter. Snape flinched. The boy started to turn towards him, and Snape couldn't bear to look at him anymore. Didn't want to see Lily's beautiful green eyes staring out of a Potter's face. He fled.

That night, after he had Vanished every bit of detritus out of the house, he stood in the sitting room of Spinner's End and cast _Tempusmotor_ over and over and over again. But the helix of time had moved on, and only adjacent portions of the helix could be bridged. If only Lily hadn't broken the loop. If only Lily hadn't trusted a treacherous Secret Keeper. If only Lily hadn't married Potter.

How could you, Lily? How could you?

_Fifteen years afterwards..._

Snape stared into Potter's mind, and an all-too-familiar copy of _Advanced Potion-Making _looked back at him. Potter could lie all he wanted and present a different copy for inspection, but Snape knew the truth. Harry Potter had taken Snape's very own copy of _Advanced Potion-Making_ and used the spells he had written therein with no thought for the consequences. With a grim smile, Snape assigned Potter detention every Saturday morning until the end of term, and then he left the blood-spattered bathroom and went straight to his office.

He pulled out every single one of the books on time that he had stolen from the Restricted Section so long ago, set them on his desk, and flipped through the applicable passages again, looking for anything that he might have missed when he had first put the spell together after Lily had died the first time. Finding nothing, he attempted _Tempusmotor_ several more times, but to no effect. The helix had spiraled on.

Snape thought of Potter's greedy eyes poring over his writing, stealing spells he didn't deserve. What would Potter use a time loop for? To save Black? And who else would he allow to learn of the spell in the process—certainly Weasley and Granger, but Potter was too careless to keep secrets or block the Dark Lord out of his mind. And if the Dark Lord learned of this spell, what evil would he wreak with it, even worse than anything Potter might come up with?

Snape opened the top book on the pile, the one with all his notes. He ran his hands one last time over his writing, where Lily's own fingers had touched.

Then he pointed his wand at the pile and whispered "_Incendio_," and the helix of time was closed to newcomers for all time to come.


End file.
